ResearchBuzz

First Google’s new book search features and now some upgrades to Google Spreadsheet. Like I’m ever going to get seven hours of sleep again in my life.

I have actually been using Google Spreadsheets a fair amount at work. It’s not as full-featured as Excel, but I don’t often create spreadsheets that need so much horsepower. And there’s something handy about knowing your spreadsheet is as close as any Web-enabled computer.

I was very happy to see that Google Spreadsheets now has AutoFill, which is for me the official “feature that most quickly becomes annoying when it isn’t available.” Especially when you’re filling in date ranges. Google has made the best use of its Web connection by hooking in AutoFill to Google Sets. Remember Google Sets? Refresh your memory at http://labs.google.com/sets . With Google Sets you can enter a few items that are similar (colors, candy bars, cities) and Google Sets will try to fill out your list with more similar items.

Enter a few similar items in your Google Spreadsheet, and select that range of cells. Hold down CTRL (if you’re using Linux or Windows) or ALT (if you’re using Mac) while you’re clicking and dragging on the small box in the lower right corner of the cells. Google will try to fill the range of cells you’ve covered with similar items. I found it worked really well for colors, though Google couldn’t cover the entire range I selected. It went a little bonkers when I started entering book genres, and introduced a couple of non-English words. But other than that the Google Sets offering worked pretty well.

Google Spreadsheets has also introduced new data import features which allow you to import RSS feeds, HTML, comma- and tab-delimited files, and text-delimited files. You can get all the skinny on those import functions at the Google Docs documentation. The import function that really caught my fancy was the feed import function.

The syntax is =ImportFeed(URL, [feedQuery | itemQuery], [headers], [numItems]) . This basic query will fill my spreadsheet with a list of recently updated or added items at Project Gutenberg: =ImportFeed(”http://www.gutenberg.org/feeds/today.rss”) . Perhaps I only want the last five items from the feed, and I want to include headers instead of only the data. The syntax would look like this: =ImportFeed(”http://www.gutenberg.org/feeds/today.rss”,,true,5). (The two commas together are because I don’t have a feed or item query in use here.)

Let’s do a project. Say I want I want to keep a tally of new DVD releases, and use it in Google Spreadsheets so I can share it with other people and we can make notes (”Seen it,” “I want to get that one”, “Huh?”) I go poking around for an RSS feed of new DVD releases and find one at Rotten Tomatoes.

I enter this RSS Feed into Google Spreadsheets ( =ImportFeed(”http://i.rottentomatoes.com/syndication/rss/new_releases.xml”, , true, 100) ) and presto, I have a listing of the latest DVD releases. But I only have as many as are in the RSS feed right now. Ideally I’d like to be able to save an accumulate items as they are listed in the feed. Feedcatch might work for that — but I’m not sure if Feedcatch is still functional. Anyone know?

Once I have the data, I can publish it in several ways, including creating an embeddable IFrame for a blog. Further, I can specify a range of information to embed, not the whole feed.

This embedded frame will automatically update as the sheet itself updates.

As I think about it, I think that the ability to import HTML files might be pretty fun too. Say I was Tim Carter of AsktheBuilder.com . I could import a Google search result that gave me the pages indexed in the last 24 hours that contained the string AsktheBuilder and pulled out all links on that page:

=importXml(”www.google.com/search?as_qdr=d&q=askthebuilder&num=100″, “//a/@href”)

There’s crud in these results — it’s ALL the links on the page, after all — but this might be a useful way to monitor for pillaged content, nice comments, etc. THEN you add a column next to the first column that pulls titles from the content you’ve found, giving you a quick way to glance over search results. (Like so, where the column is A35: =importXml(A35, “//title”)) Unfortunately you’re limited to 50 functions per spreadsheet (FIDDLESTICKS!) so there’s a limit to what you can import.

I could and will spend a LOT of time playing with this. If the spreadsheet offered filtering functions, many more amazing things could be done. Who needs sleep anyway?

One day many decades from now when I am six zillion years old, all my great-great-great-grandchildren (or grandrobots, I shall not be prejudiced) will cluster around my knees and say, “Granny, tell us about the old days when you actually installed software on your computer.”

I find myself using online applications more and more — the lines are starting to get blurry. But places like Simple Spark ( http://simplespark.com/ ) really bring it home to you the variety of stuff that’s available online (or occasionally on-phone — there are some iPhone apps on here.)

The site is currently tracking over 5300 applications. You can browse these by most recent, by type (the aforementioned iPhone category, as well as Wii or more general mobile apps) or by category of application. You can also do a keyword search. At this writing applications on the front page include an experimental site to share meteorological data, a moon phase app for the iPhone, and an URL-shortener service. All over the map here.

I decided to do a keyword search for calendar. Simple Spark found 114 apps. (Yikes.) Besides the usual suspects like Google Calendar, there were a variety of results from services as general as RSSCalendar and Calendar to specific as Ovulation Calendar (should be self-explanatory) to an application that hooks Twitter and Google Calendar together, to FourthBook (Web-based church management system.)

Detail pages include an overview, several screenshots, and a link to visit the site. There’s also a place for reviews (though nothing I looked at actually had reviews) and a “related items” list. If you register, you can save apps to your own Simple Spark My Apps (but you do not have to register to search or browse the site.)

Web apps are getting to be like Web sites — it’s less and less possible to track what’s available. High time for a directory. Lots to see here but a huge timesink.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Let me risk beating a point into the ground: in order to find things when you search you have to use the proper vocabulary. And on the Internet, the proper vocabulary is changing constantly, especially in the arenas of tech and popular culture. SiteVolume, at http://sitevolume.com/, is a nifty little tool letting you know how much vocabulary words are being used across certain social sites like MySpace, Digg, and Flickr.

You can enter up to five words and get a bar graph of how often the words appear on each site. It was interesting comparing the name of Web tools, search engines, and technologies. Especially the word Twitter, which was almost nonexistent some places but which showed up fairly frequently other places (besides Twitter itself, of course.)

The presentation is pretty slick but the methodology behind getting the numbers is pretty simple; it’s a Google search. (You can get more information on the questions and comments page.) If I wanted to do some general searches, but wasn’t sure which keywords to start from, I’d compare their frequency on these sites and perhaps pick the most popular (or the least popular if I was trying to limit my results.) Fun toy.